Aaron Wall’s got one of the best lists of SEO related blogs I’ve run across. Although I think most of the people here know what they are doing I think SEO as a general concept is overrated. There are risks with even moderately aggressive SEO so it’s not clear to me that a business should invest in specialists. Rather in most cases the best approach is to follow the generally accepted good practices and create as large a content footprint as possible.

Hey, here’s another list of SEO blogs 

Aaron’s reply is such a good point I’m going to change my advice and suggest that sites should either get some SEO advice or assign people in-house to review the wealth of *mostly* accurate SEO advice online.

1. Until you really dig into them it is hard to appreciate how bad off the SEO is even on some of the leading authoritative sites on the web. For many companies SEO isn’t just about taking chances, but is also about minimizing risks and using the assets you have. Sometimes an external consultant is necessary to get a frame of thought to be able to move through a large corporation.Obviously given my brand and market position I have to state that I think SEO is good stuff, but I think there are lots of way to bake SEO into your marketing plan that cost little extra in terms of time or effort, but can deliver large returns. Comment by aaron wall | October 22, 2006

   Aaron that is such a good point I’ll change my advice. It is clear that many companies, even some huge ones, are ignoring even the most basic aspects of optimizing websites. I agree the money they lose due to this is perhaps even hundreds of times what they would pay to have *you* review their site and suggest changes, and thousands of times what they’d pay to buy your excellent SEO Book.

   Part of the challenge I’m talking about however are the growing number of bogus “SEO Specialists”, online SEO scams, and even folks working at the big SEO companies who suck. I ran an interesting experiment last year with a very prominent SEO firm. They did “good” work but it did not boost my traffic and I realized I would likely do better myself simply adding, for example, a blog and more content.